1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to wood gluing machinery and more particularly to an automatic gluing and conveying means which coacts with clamp carriers for automatically applying glue to wood segments and positioning the glued wood segments at appropriate stations for placement of the wood segments into a clamping apparatus. The conveying apparatus includes an articulated portion which enables the conveyor path to traverse the path of the clamping apparatus without interfering with the clamping apparatus.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Clamp carriers have been used for many years to facilitate the manufacturing process by which individual segments of wood may be formed into panels by gluing the edges of the wood segments together. These clamp carriers have become sophisticated and have evolved to enable rapid tightening and loosening of the individual clamps to facilitate loading and unloading of the wood segments and panels to and from the clamps. The clamps in each rank are grouped into clamping sections relating to the separate panels being formed, which have been built to hold up to forty ranks of six or more clamps each. U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,771,779, 4,624,451, 5,006,193, the entire disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference, show developments in the automated clamp tighteners and flatteners.
Because of the increased efficiency of these automated clamp tighteners and flatteners, they are capable of gluing a very large number of wood segments in a given time. This has placed an increasing burden on the operator of the machine. The operator of the machine has to stack and unstack the wood segments and glued panels from the machine and additionally apply glue to the edges of the individual wood segments so that when the segments are placed in the clamp rack and the clamp is tightened, the glue will bond the individual segments into a unitary panel.
The gluing cannot be carried out far from the clamping area since wet glue on the individual panels would tend to contact various areas of the machinery causing numerous problems to the machinery and to the operators.
In the past, small gluing devices were placed behind the operator's station and the clamp carrier operator would apply glue to the individual segments of wood. The operator would then manually load the glued segments directly into the clamp carrier after the application of the glue. This required excessive movement and time on the part of the operator, often making the operator the weakest link in the manufacturing process. If the operator could not apply glue to the wood segments, load and unload the clamps at maximum speed settings for the apparatus, then the apparatus would have to be slowed or an additional worker used just to apply glue to the wood segments.
Additionally, it was desirable to have some automated gluing apparatus which could bring the wood to the location where it was to be placed in the clamping equipment. Due to the nature of the automated or manual clamp carriers, however, this could not be effectively done because when the conveyor was placed close enough to the location of the clamps, the paths of the conveyor and clamps interfered.
Combining an automated glue applicator with a conveyor was an improvement but still did not accomplish the task of bringing wood segments with glue to a location close enough to effectively reduce the burden on the operator of the clamp carrier.